


Homeward Bound

by QueenAng



Category: Transformers - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Family, M/M, Other, Reunions, Transformer Sparklings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-21
Updated: 2020-03-21
Packaged: 2021-03-01 05:08:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,615
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23249737
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/QueenAng/pseuds/QueenAng
Summary: A threat to Praxus leads to Prowl returning to his old home, alongside Jazz. Barricade is the opposite of helpful.
Relationships: Barricade & Prowl, Jazz/Prowl
Comments: 3
Kudos: 111





	Homeward Bound

It was never supposed to happen like this.

For one, they never should have been back in Praxus in the first place. They had been happy alongside Optimus and his new party against the Decepticons based in Iacon. Prowl adjusted well out of his home city-state, and Jazz was just happy to be with his best friend again, with the addition of a beautiful and brilliant conjunx at his side. Prowl, when released from the grips of his position as a Tower mech in Praxus, had flourished, and Jazz found it alluring to watch (even if he did argue with Optimus almost daily).

Jazz assumed it was the stress that had sickened Prowl to near exhaustion. He had thrown himself headfirst into the Autobot cause, in a new city surrounded by mechs he didn’t know. Jazz’s gentle, teasing warnings to rest flew over his helm, and it was only a threat from Ratchet that made him unwillingly forfeit part of his duty to Jazz. Prowl hadn’t returned to his previous state quite yet, but Jazz thought all he needed was some more time to kick back.

And then Bumblebee had returned with news from Kaon.

“It’s Praxus,” he said between hard vents. “They’re going to attack Praxus next.”

Ironhide was the first to speak. “Aw, Pits.”

Optimus rose back to his pedes from where he had knelt next to Bumblebee. “Jazz,” he said, “is there any way to get a message to Praxus?”

Jazz shook his helm. “They cut off communication to the outside a few cycles ago. They’ve really hunkered down now.”

Optimus nodded sagely. “Then we will have to send someone to deliver the message personally. These bots must be warned what is coming.”

“Like they’ll believe us,” Ironhide muttered. “How many times have we told these mechs about the ‘Cons? How many times did they listen?”

Optimus ignored him, looking to Jazz.

“Not real possible, OP,” Jazz said. “The borders are shut down as well. They’re only letting in Praxians now.”

Ironhide gave a hearty chuckle, sans any real amusement. “Well, good thing we’ve got a Praxian in our servos, ain’t it?”

Optimus didn’t object to using Prowl as a tool to get them inside Praxus. Not only could he get them inside, but his position as a former Tower mech would allow them to reach the higher-ups of Praxus. Jazz was given leave to go as well, because as Prowl’s bonded he would be allowed in, though much less welcomed.

“You sure you’re good with this?” Jazz asked as their transport neared the border of Praxus. “You seemed pretty adamant about not going back after we left.”

Prowl’s gaze remained fixed on a data-pad in his servos. “My personal opinions regarding Praxus are no longer of any concern, given the gravity of the situation at hand.”

Jazz returned to his seat beside Prowl. “They’re of concern to me. Doesn’t that count for anything?”

The smallest of smiles graced Prowl’s faceplates. He leaned forward to touch his chevron against Jazz’s helm, something that didn’t used to make Jazz feel much of anything until he learned about Praxus’s specific ideas of intimacy regarding their chevrons. Now he leaned willingly into the gesture, dimming his optical visor.

“I should apologize to you,” Prowl said. “My home city-state has not been warm in its reception to you.”

“Ah, well, that was only after I started courting their hottest bot.”

“Jazz.”

“The green-opticked monster is no laughing matter, Prowl.”

“You’re a fool.”

“Ah, but I’m _your_ fool.”

“Most certainly.”

When the transport stopped and the alarm sounded to mark their destination, Prowl rested his helm one last time against Jazz’s. Praxus disliked outsiders; the only thing they disliked more than non-Praxians was seeing Praxians court non-Praxians. It had taken Jazz an eternity to break down all Prowl’s hang-ups about intimacy, and they were voluntarily walking back into the city that taught them.

The border guard who greeted them outside the transport had a familiar scowl on his faceplates, though he didn’t pull it off anywhere as nicely as Prowl did.

“Designation?” he queried.

“Prowl. This is my bonded, Jazz.”

The guard’s expression turned darker, but he didn’t say anything. He gestured them past the checkpoint, and Jazz could feel his glower tracking their alt-modes as they sped into Praxus.

Prowl’s plan was to head immediately for his family’s headquarters in the government district. He had hoped to convince his spark-brother, Barricade, to accompany him to the Council of Praxus and make his point together. Barricade retained his position as an Enforcer, whereas Prowl had given his up to follow Jazz to Iacon and bond to him. The Council would be far more likely to listen to a Praxian they didn’t see as having betrayed them and their ideals.

Jazz had seen the compound a few times before, mostly when he was sneaking in to convince Prowl to sneak out. Praxus had style, but the look of this compound always left a bad taste in his intake.

They transformed back into their root modes in the entrance courtyard. The door slid open, and an – of course – scowling Barricade stepped out, his servos behind his back.

“The guards said you had returned,” Barricade said. His optics slid to Prowl’s side to glare at Jazz. “You might as well come in, if you came all this way.”

Cultural niceties prevented him from locking Jazz out like he had done the other times Prowl attempted to bring him home. It was seen as an insult to the other mech to do something against his bonded. Judging from the glower Barricade fixed on Jazz and didn’t let up as they moved inside, he wanted nothing more than to throw away said niceties and activate his arm cannons.

Prowl came to a stop in the hall. “Did you receive my correspondence regarding why I am here?”

Barricade moved to stand beside him. “Received it? Sure. Believe it?” He made a derisive noise.

“There is nothing about belief in regards to this situation. We received credible inside information from a well-trained scout about the—” Prowl cut off, a servo stretching out to touch the wall. His optics flickered and dimmed.

Jazz immediately pushed past Barricade to grab his other arm. “Prowler? You good?”

Prowl straightened again. “I am fine. Thank you.” He touched his chassis. “I think I must have hit a rock when we drove here.”

Barricade gestured deeper into the compound. “Let’s sit,” he said.

The cycles that followed would have alarmed any mech not privy to this family’s means of communication. Jazz had heard Barricade and Prowl go at it quite a few times; Pit, he had been the reason for it more than once. Prowl didn’t yell often, and Jazz got the sense that Barricade didn’t either, but put them together with a sensitive topic between them and suddenly it was like a switch flipped.

The two of them argued in futile circles. Barricade would attempt to dismiss Prowl’s evidence, and Prowl would break down his dismissal with impeccable logic, and Barricade would resort to throwing personal insults (which Jazz was often mentioned in), to which Prowl would respond by bringing up his next piece of evidence. Jazz quickly lost interest and found himself wandered around the compound, now that Barricade had no right to stop him from snooping.

From the second floor, while studying an imposing case full of data-pads, Jazz suddenly became aware of silence. He peered over the edge of the railing into the foyer below to see Prowl resting his helm in his servo.

Barricade didn’t miss the opportunity for a dig. “Giving up already?” he sneered. “Iacon has made you soft, brother. I told you it was a mistake to associate with those mechs.”

“I believe I may have twisted something when I transformed,” Prowl said. “My spark—”

“Are these the excuses you tell yourself?” Barricade asked. “It’s probably a side effect from sharing your spark with that low-life Polyhexian. Primus knows where he’s been, what he’s got.”

“Barricade—” Prowl started.

“No.” Barricade stood up from the table, slamming his fist down. “You need to listen to me. There are no Decepticons coming to Praxus. We have nothing to offer them. We haven’t even been listening to their messages, so it’s not like it could be an inside job. You are just so desperate to restore your standing with the Council that you’re willing to make up any sort of terrorist activity you can get away with. It’s not our fault you regret bonding to some outsider. You—”

“ _Barricade_ ,” Prowl hissed.

Jazz felt the sudden flare of pain across the bond in his own spark. He couldn’t help but keel over, a servo flying to his chassis. He briefly felt Prowl’s panic dissipate as he realized something, but before Jazz could inquire about it, he heard Barricade yell, “Prowl!”

Jazz peered through the bars of the railing and saw Prowl lying limp on the floor, Barricade over him. His first thought was that Barricade had finally lashed out, but there were no scorch marks from laser fire or pools of energon beneath them.

Barricade swept Prowl up into his arms, lifting the mech effortlessly from the floor and charging towards the entrance. Jazz started to stand up to follow them, but another flare of pain through his spark had him freeze. By the time he was on his pedes, Barricade was gone.

Jazz leapt down the stairs and transformed into his alt-mode, speeding down the entrance hallway. The compound, given its important occupants and equally as important neighbors, was situated close to a towering and bustling hospital. Jazz saw Barricade, with Prowl, vanish into the entrance, and Jazz followed quickly behind them.

A medic had taken Prowl from Barricade’s grasp and laid him on a berth. He shouted something to the nurse-bot that Jazz didn’t catch, and he and Barricade started down the hall.

Jazz grabbed hold of the medic before he could follow after them. “Where are you taking him?”

“Excuse me?” The medic recoiled from Jazz’s grasp.

“The Praxian that Barricade just brought in. He collapsed.” The medic began walking, and Jazz stubbornly stuck to his side. “What happened to him? Is he going to be okay?”

“I can’t reveal anything without the patient’s consent,” the medic said.

“Consent? Mech, I’m his conjunx!”

The medic halted outside a white door, but didn’t put in his access code yet. “I’m sorry, but while that may be true—”

“It is!”

“—we do not allow non-Praxians into our treatment suites. You can see this mech when he’s well, should he ask for you.”

“You gotta be joking,” Jazz said. “I need to be in there. I need to be with him. I felt him when he collapsed, his spark—”

The medic entered his access code and vanished into the suite, leaving Jazz staring at a blank white wall.

Prowl didn’t remember collapsing. His vision came back in staticky flickers. He felt Barricade maneuvering him onto a berth, heard the sound of a medic and a nurse-bot quickly conversing by his helm. A sudden flare of pain through his spark sent his vision clipping out again, and when it returned, he looked up at a much lower ceiling and heard a door shut behind them.

“Where am I?” Prowl asked, trying to sit up.

Barricade pushed him back down. “Bad idea.”

The nurse-bot began hooking lines to his arm. “My name is Turbine. Are you aware of how long you’ve been sparked?”

“Sparked?” Prowl echoed. Barricade’s grip on his servo turned painfully tight.

The door slid open once more, this time to allow in a medic. Prowl’s spark sunk. “You were right,” the medic told Barricade, “the outsider did show up and try to gain entrance.”

“Jazz,” Prowl said quietly.

“Keep him out,” Barricade said, louder. “He did this.”

“No.” Prowl tried to pull his servo back from Barricade’s, but his grip had no give.

There was a bang, followed by the sound of an automatic door being forced open, and then Jazz appeared at the end of his berth.

“You shot my door?” the medic exclaimed.

“You took my conjunx,” Jazz retorted. “I’m feeling a little trigger-happy towards _you_.”

Before the medic or Barricade could say anything, Prowl murmured, “Jazz.”

The mech shoved past Barricade to stand at Prowl’s helm, a servo coming up to cup the side. He bent down to press his helm against Prowl’s chevron, but didn’t bother to offline his optical visor like Prowl did, not with Barricade standing so close and looking so furious.

“I got you, babe,” Jazz murmured.

The first bombs fell over Praxus before the bitlet emerged.

None of them struck the hospital itself, but the following ground invasion was of some concern.

Alarms began to sound after a few cycles, signaling the arrival of the ground force. The sparkling didn’t emerge until it had gone quiet again, and dark, and the power to the hospital had been lost. Barricade only left the room to help fortify the entrance to the building after Prowl had passed into unconsciousness.

Jazz had never held a sparkling in his life. He felt like the medic had handed him a little grenade, which made quiet whirs each time Jazz shifted. The nurse-bot began disconnecting wires from Prowl while the medic kept talking to Jazz about the bitlet, like Jazz could concentrate on anything other than the small blue optics peering up at him.

A crash echoed from outside the hospital and Jazz froze. The sparkling made a discomforted noise.

“It’s all right,” the medic said. “The hospital is well defended. Enforcers would have converged here after the first wave of bombs. You’ll both be safe. There’s no way to get in.”

And then the laser fire pierced his chest.

The nurse-bot met the same fate too soon to even cry out. Jazz drew his own blaster and turned around.

Barricade stood there, flanked by two larger Decepticons. He had lowered his blaster, which was still smoking. Three sets of red eyes pierced through the darkness. Jazz could have had a fighting chance against them, most definitely, had one of his arms not been occupied by a sparkling and his frame not guarding his unconscious mate.

“Go,” Barricade said to the two Decepticons. “I’ll deal with this one myself.”

After exchanging a look, the two Decepticons bowed out of the room, disappearing further down the hallway. The sound of laser fire followed them.

“You shouldn’t have brought him here,” Barricade growled.

“You shouldn’t have joined up with the Decepticons, my mech,” Jazz replied. “Guess we all make mistakes, huh?”

“I just wanted my brother back,” Barricade said. “First you took him from me, and now you nearly get him killed. Twice over. He was better off without you. We both were.”

“Agree to disagree there.”

The sparkling in Jazz’s arms let out a sharp, wailing beep. For the first time, Barricade’s optics fixed solely on it, half-hidden behind Jazz’s arm. Jazz twisted to better hide him from Barricade’s view, while never removing his blaster from pointing at the mech. Barricade’s aim never so much as wavered.

“You really gonna kill me while I’m holding your nephew?” Jazz asked. “While I’m standing over your brother? You really want Prowl to wake up covered in my energon, with his sparkling without a sire?”

A long moment of silence and stillness followed that. Slowly, Barricade lowered his weapon.

“You let me go,” Barricade said, “and I’ll tell them this room is full of dead mechs. I was their insider, they’ll trust me. You wouldn’t be able to fight your way out past our forces. Give us a few cycles to clear out of this area and then comm for aid.”

“Quick switch,” Jazz commented.

The gears in Barricade’s jaw clenched. “It isn’t for you. Prowl shouldn’t have to— Prowl can’t do this alone. If I kill you, the bond will kill him as well. He’s vulnerable right now.” Barricade’s optics slid back to the sparkling. “And so is he.”

Jazz lowered his own weapon, but he didn’t take his finger off the trigger. “So we have an understanding.”

Barricade’s red eyes flared in the darkness, lit only by the dying blue light of the medical equipment around them. “I’ll be back for him, some day,” Barricade said. “Both of them. I swear it. I’ll find a way to dissolve a spark-bond without a Prime’s doing, and I’ll come back for them.”

“I’ll be waiting, mech,” Jazz said. “But if I catch you so much as looking my kid’s way, I’ll take you to my special meeting room and take you apart piece by piece.”

Barricade started to step back, keeping a close optic on Jazz, when his gaze flickered to Prowl. He hesitated. “Tell him,” he said. “Tell him that I’ll be back for him. And that I’m sorry about this.”

Jazz said nothing, but raised his blaster again.

Barricade got the message and stepped into the hallway, dragging the damaged door back into place to shield the room. Jazz didn’t move again, didn’t dare lower his blaster once more, until he heard Barricade’s pede-falls vanish into the distance, and silence fell over the room once more.

Jazz dropped his blaster and collapsed to the floor, leaning against the medical berth. The sparkling beeped unhappily at his shifting. “Shh.” Jazz stroked the small chevron adorning the sparkling’s little grey helm. It was too dark to make out many details, but Jazz saw that along with Prowl’s chevron, he had a pair of fluttering doorwings.

The touches to his chevron made the bitlit stop squirming. He stared at Jazz for long moments with a piercing pale blue gaze. As Jazz started to hum, softly enough as to not be heard beyond the walls, his optics began to flicker. A few kliks later, and Jazz held a sleeping sparkling for the first time.

Jazz did as Barricade instructed, waiting a few cycles after the last sounds of the invaders faded from the hospital to comm for help. His personal comm was nothing but static, so he had to place the bitlet at Prowl’s side and venture out to the front desk and do his best repair work to get their system working. He sent out a comm for aid and returned to find the bitlet clicking and beeping like crazy. Jazz swept him back up into his arms and began to hum another song, tracing the pattern of his chevron in a calm repetitive motion.

Help arrived not long after he sent the signal out. He heard Ironhide’s gruff voice ordering mechs into groups to scout the hallways for survivors. Not a moment later, the metal door was being hauled out of the way and light shone into the room.

“Jazz?” Ironhide asked. “That you?”

Jazz rose to his pedes. “Get Ratchet,” he said.

Ironhide stomped into the room. “You get shot? Where is—oh. Damn.”

Jazz had seen Ironhide face down scores of Decepticons without a glimmer of fear in his optics. There was utter panic on his faceplates as he stared down at the bitlet in Jazz’s arms.

“Shot? Did someone say shot?” Ratchet pushed past Ironhide. He caught sight of the sparkling and held out his servos.

Jazz took a step back.

Ratchet’s stern expression softened. “Come on, kid, I’m not going to hurt him. Just let me look him over to make sure he’s all right, then he’s all yours again.”

Ratchet carefully took the bitlet from Jazz’s grasp, expertly avoiding the doorwings poking from his back. All the jostling around woke the sparkling up. He moved to the second medical berth in the room and began looking him over. The sparkling’s perceptive blue gaze seemed to follow his every movement. Jazz watched it all with a sort of numbness he wasn’t familiar with.

“He looks fine. All limbs present and in the right places. Has he eaten yet?”

Jazz shook his helm, quickly collecting the sparkling back into his arms. “Prowl hasn’t woken up yet.” He searched his processor, and added, “The medic said it was rough on him.”

Ratchet crossed over to Prowl’s berth. “I can remove a plate from his wrist to get hold of a fuel line for him. Normally you’d just transform it away, but…”

Jazz nodded mutely.

Ratchet, with Ironhide’s help, wheeled Prowl’s berth out of the room and down the hallway. The rest of the rescue team had disappeared, searching other rooms, but no other calls for Ratchet’s aid had come. Jazz, with a sinking feeling in his chest, knew what that meant.

Barricade had saved them this time, and promised he’d be back again.

Prowl finally awoke on the transport back to Iacon and immediately demanded the sparkling.

“What about Bluestreak?”

Prowl looked up. “Pardon?”

“For his designation,” Jazz said. “I was torn between Silverstreak, ‘cause of his coloring, and Blues, for the music. So I thought, why not combine them?”

Prowl smiled down at the bitlet in his arms. “I like it. Bluestreak.”

It was a while before Prowl asked the question that had clearly been bothering him. “What happened to Barricade?”

Jazz shrugged. “Dunno, love. After you passed out, he left to help fortify the entrance against the ground invasion. I never the left the room. Never heard him come back, either.”

“But he could have gotten out,” Prowl murmured.

Jazz didn’t have the spark to correct him. “Yeah, babe,” he said. “I’m sure he’s fine.”

What Prowl didn't know wouldn't hurt them.

Besides, Jazz would get a hold of Barricade long before he could set his sights back on Prowl and Bluestreak.


End file.
